They repaved my neighborhood streets this past week. As I was waiting for the pilot car I was struck by how good these guys were at making roads.
But how horrible they were at managing the schedule of pilot cars.
And I got to thinking:
- IQ is highly heritable. Up to 80% so.
- IQ tests are an imperfect measure of intelligence. But in the aggregate, are pretty good.
- 100 years ago, occupation didn’t filter IQ. That is, we had very intelligent people working in factories and shops and in the trades. Much more so than we have today.
- As colleges have become better at sorting on IQ, we have become a society that is sorted by intelligence.
- People marry who they hang out with.
- If intelligent people hang out with and marry other intelligent people, they will have children who have higher IQs.
- If you took 1,000 employees who held traffic signs at construction sites and measured their IQs they would score lower than 1,000 college graduates.
- Those 1,000 college graduates would score lower than 1,000 Harvard alum.
I don’t know what policy implications this has, but I’m afraid of the ramifications.